Here are this steps, according to Avinash:

Step #1: Visit the website. Note objectives, customer experience, suckiness.

Step #2: How good is the acquisition strategy? Traffic Sources Report.

Step #3: How strongly do Visitors orbit the website? Visitor Loyalty & Recency.

Step #4: What can I find that is broken and quickly fixable? Top Landing Pages.

Step #5: What content makes us most money? $Index Value Metric.

Step #6: How Sophisticated Is Their Search Strategy? Keyword Tag Clouds.

Step #7: Are they making money or making noise? Goals & Goal Values.

Step #8: Can the Marketing Budget be optimized? Campaign Conversions/Outcomes.

Step #9: Are we helping the already convinced buyers? Funnel Visualization.

Step #10: What are the unknown unknowns I am blind to? Analytics Intelligence.

Here is the original post, with the detailed steps and many tips.  A must read for everyone!

In fact, there is a missing metric hidden behind this problem. In Analytics you may have more than one goal, let’s say you are monitoring leads, or newsletter subscriptions, beside the e-commerce transactions. So, it would be nice to import them in Google AdWords. The problem in Campaign Reports, the main report used by majority of users, is that you cannot chose what very conversion you want to see there, or maybe split that number into particular conversions you are monitoring.

So, next time you are importing conversions from Google Analytics in Adwords try to be careful and don’t do it without think a little!

Here’s the list of the Top 10 converting websites, showing their rank, company name, industry sector and average six-month conversion rate.

1. Schwan’s, Food, 41.7 percent
2. ProFlowers, Flowers and gifts, 26.5 percent
3. Vitacost.com, Health and nutrition, 24.0 percent
4. Woman Within, Catalog /clothing, 22.4 percent
5. Blair, Catalog /clothing, 20.5 percent
6. Lands’ End, Catalog /clothing, 19.5 percent
7. Doctors Foster and Smith, Pet supplies, 18.6 percent
8. Office Depot, Office, 18.4 percent
9. Roaman’s, Catalog /clothing, 18.4 percent
10. QVC, Jewelry +, 18.3 percent

Some key summary statistics:

• 9 have a catalog;
• 9 do not offer free shipping (!!!)
• 8 offer a simple sign up on their home page;
• 4 out of the top 5 force a full registration before a first purchase;
• 9 out of 10 offer a 1-800 number on their home page;
• 10 out of 10 use remarketing (!!!)

It’s a different mindset: To these companies, it’s not about search engine optimization, or page views, and making a sale, but about the second, third, fourth sales to the same customer, driving profitability for their companies. And in the process, they get the highest conversion rates in the industry as their customers come back to buy again, and again, and again.

Read the entire analysis here: first part and second part.

• Google Insight for Search
• AdWords Conversion Tracking
• Conversion Optimizer
• Google Analytics
• Website Optimizer

You get 25 useful pages that will help you increase your online profits by tracking results and driving competitive improvements. Full guide (14 languages available) can be downloaded from here.

“Our customers are telling us that they are facing a tough year and are cautious, particularly for borrowing, but that their appetite for searching on line for the best deals is stronger than ever before.” Peter Plumb, moneysupermarket.com

Seems to be a new trend in eCommerce, which suggest that showing the prices for a competing site is something that consumers want and that can be beneficial for etailers. People will check anyway for prices on different websites, so why not saving their time and keeping them on our website by showing the competitors’ prices directly on the product page?

But for any new idea, there are pros and cons. Linda Bustos from GetElastic consider that is not such a good idea:

“The study suggests adding price comparison because customers like it is a good decision. I disagree. 63% may like to see comparison, but will they purchase from you? They may return to use your comparison tool, but will they boost or dilute your site conversion? Does loyalty translate to sales or loyalty of visits? Are you spending oodles of money to drive new traffic only to guide them to another site? Are you confusing the customer and killing conversion by giving too much choice?”

And she continues with 3 cons for this:

• Risk of Lawsuit – if prices are not up-to-date
• Advertising for the Competition – why would you do something like that?
• Risk of eroding trust – if you show only higher prices or inaccurate information you’ll lose your credibility

On the other side, Win Buyer came with a study completed in November 2009, that examines the
results of employing Onsite Comparative Pricing (OCP) on a multitude of US-based online stores and the critical components therein which drive lift in conversion as well cart size.

Results of the study indicate that the more product and price matches available for display in the OCP application, the higher the increase in conversion-to-sale, average order size, and total site revenues:

• average order value increased by 3.2% on pages with Winbuyer’s OCP application
• average revenue lift of 4.9% achieved on pages that applied the Winbuyer OCP
• total site revenues increased by 2%

Over 200 online retailers in the US and UK. including Overstock.com, Ritz Interactive, GameQuest and Hayneedle, are now offering their customers the ability to compare prices directly on their product pages using WinBuyer’s Onsite Comparative Pricing (OCP) application.

Think about it. Is it suitable for your website?

What will bring this module for you? It will record the online transactions and will link revenues to visitors, content and traffic sources, helping you making decisions related to the marketing campaigns and the website in order to reduce the abandon rate and increase conversions.

Check this short clip to get familiar with the GA eCommerce tracking system:

It looks really nice, right? Now, how to get this? You can find here a complete installation & setup tutorial, or, if you are using osCommerce, you can find here an add-on that will do all the hard work for you.

Now, you can easily identify the most profitable campaigns, keywords, channels, you can improve ROI on your website and keyword bidding. Here is a video that will show you how to identify high spenders with GA:

• Email marketing open rates by industry and list size

Unique opens are calculated as the number of addresses which were tracked as having viewed a message divided by the total number of HTML messages sent. Each address, even if it opened the message more than once, was counted only once; hence, showing unique opens.

Religious and spiritual organizations had the highest open rates among large lists, followed by telecommunications and travel companies.

“A smaller list does not directly affect open and click rates, but mailings to smaller lists may be targeted better, contain more relevant content or have more recent subscribers,” wrote the authors of the report.

• Email marketing click rates by industry and list size
  

Click rates are defined as the total number of unique clicks (i.e., the first time a person clicks on a link) divided by the total number of opportunities to click. It is calculated as follows: the total number of unique clicks divided by the product of the number of links in each message and the number of total recipients.

Click-through rates for lists of over 1,000 recipients were also highest for religious e-mails, followed by travel, general consumer and retail.

Other findings:

• Most popular terms in subject lines:

1. news
2. party
3. newsletter
4. free
5. night
6. sale
7. com
8. update
9. holiday
10. week

• Best days to send – Though weekends and the beginning of the week outperform the other days, Monday is the clear winner having both the highest open rate and click rate.
• Subject lines – Emails with subject lines shorter than 35 characters were opened more than emails with subject lines longer than 35 characters.
• How soon do people open their email? – 74.5% of opens occur within the first 24 hours and 84.3% occurs within the first 48 hours.

Full report can be downloaded for free at http://www.mailermailer.com/metrics.rwp.